Letter from Kelly

In her book Story Genius, former literary agent and author Lisa Cron diagnoses a common underlying cause for why many books are beautifully written, but meandering and vague: The writers “inadvertently [fell] into the trap of treating [the narrator’s] POV as if it were a camera lens, passively recording the things that happened.”

But narrators, especially in first-person stories, are never neutral, because they are written by human beings, who are also never neutral. Narrators, and especially those who are also protagonists, have histories, which color everything.

So how do you work the narrator’s history into the story, so the reader understands the prejudices and expectations they bring to their storytelling? Last week, I read two stories by two different writers, both of whom found elegant, creative solutions to that question.

In “Charlotte’s Web Revisited,” author Ira Sukrungruang writes about reading E.B. White’s classic children’s novel to his son. Sukrungruang brings his child self into the story, writing, “How easy it is to forget who you are now—a writer and father and husband—and become that boy you once were, feeling what that boy felt when he first read the book, the first book he read himself.”

And with that sentence, the child version of the narrator becomes a distinct character in the essay, so that each phase of reading Charlotte’s Web is experienced by The Father (who is the narrator), The Boy (also the narrator, but 40 years ago), and The Son.

Sukrungruang’s decision to write the essay in second-person—the “you” POV, as in, “Your son is not you. He loves the book as you did, but he loves it in his own way.”—heightens the distinctions between the three characters and sharpens the differences in each one’s emotional reactions to the story, even when all three feel disbelief, or sadness.

And when Sukrungruang reunites all three of them at the end—(I won’t spoil it! Read it yourself!)—the alchemy is magical.

In “Against the Current of the Moment, We Arrived,” Minh Nguyên relates the narrator’s past directly, starting the essay when he is 9 and immigrating from Vietnam to the United States with his family. He uses a close narrative distance, showing the events of the story from a child’s point of view, and limited understanding of what’s happening.

Until the halfway point, when he not only jumps ahead in time to his adulthood but also widens that narrative distance, introducing a 1975 poll that showed Americans mostly opposed resettling Vietnamese refugees in the United States.

“Sometimes,” Nguyên writes, “a country moves forward not with confidence, but with reluctance, and discovers only later what it made possible.”

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” novelist L.P. Hartley wrote. But the past can also be them. Freed from the stasis of a camera on a tripod, they can walk around and tell their histories themselves.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers

P.S. Further reading: Author Lee Martin wrote some excellent craft essays about subjective first-person narrators, which you can read here or here.